Twitter to crack down on abuse, hatred, sexual harassment

Twitter has released a social network "Safety Calendar," which details a time-table for the roll-out of a series of new rules to make the platform a safer place.

According to a leaked internal email, the company plans to crack down on hate and violence on its website and on 3rd November, it will start suspending accounts of "organizations that use violence to advance their cause."

Avatars and headers with hateful imagery and symbols will be barred and tweets that contain them will be placed behind a filter. According to the social network, it will release examples of what it considers "hateful imagery" once the policy is finalised so there can be no doubts what kind of symbols will not be allowed anymore. Also, Twitter will begin blocking people's ability to sign up with hateful names on 22 November.

The Safety Calendar also details when the rules it announced in the past will go live, which will include new measures to protect victims of non-consensual nudity and unwanted sexual advances. Additionally, Twitter will update its witness reporting procedure to consider relationships, to allow faster action if it is more likely that the reporter truly has witnessed rule violations. Twitter will reveal the factors it considers when reviewing user reports on 14 November.

Twitter has also announced many new policies that address stuff like violent groups, hateful imagery and how people whose accounts have been suspended are notified.

The announcement comes less than a week after many women boycotted Twitter over its ambiguous and at times inconsistent handling of harassment, hate speech and other unwanted interactions on the social network.

''This won't be a quick or easy fix, but we're committed to getting it right,'' Twitter's safety team wrote in a blog post yesterday. ''Far too often in the past we've said we'd do better and promised transparency but have fallen short in our efforts. Starting today, you can expect regular, real-time updates about our progress. Sometimes, this may be insight into the difficult questions we're asking ourselves, even before we have the answers. This is the first time we've shared this level of visibility into our work, and we hope it helps build trust along the way.''